The essential guide to building your business through Twitter search

Many business professionals believe the Twitter search function is the most powerful tool for marketing insight ever created.

If you search Google, Bing or Yahoo, your results will be articles, videos, and websites. But if you search Twitter, the results are real-time conversations. And you can learn a lot from tapping into conversations!

Used effectively, Twitter search can be an essential tool for discovery and marketing research. And people are catching on — there are nearly 3 billion search queries performed on Twitter every day!

The basics of search are extremely easy to master. You can insert any name, phrase or hashtag in the search box at the top of the profile page and find some useful results.

But to really unlock the power of content on Twitter, it’s useful to know some advanced search operators.You can dramatically improve your search results by typing these directions directly into the search box.

Typing this:

Show you tweets that:

lang:en

Are only in the language “english”

funny movies

Contains both “funny” and “movies.” This is the default operator.

“Steelers win”

Contains the exact phrase “Steelers win”

man OR woman

Contains either “man” or “woman” (or both).

Steelers-football

Contains “Steelers” but not “football”

#Steelers

Contains the hashtag “#Steelers

from:markwschaefer

Were sent from person “markwschaefer”

to:markwschaefer

Were sent to person “markwschaefer”

@markwschaefer

Referencing person “markwschaefer”

“Chinese restaurant” near:”chicago”

Contains the exact phrase “Chinese restaurant” and sent near “chicago”

near:NYC within:15mi

were sent within 15 miles of “NYC”

“Chinese restaurant” since:2013-07-30

Contains phrase “Chinese restaurant and sent since date “2013-07-30? (year-month-day)

“Steelers” -attend : )

Contains phrase “Steelers” but not “attend” with a positive sentiment

flight : (

Contains the word “flight” with a negative sentiment

Flight ?

Contains the word “flight” and tweet is asking a question.

hilarious filter:links

Contains the word “hilarious” and linking to a URL

More Search Tips

Keep your search as simple as possible. More complex searches miss more tweets.

There is often more than one variation of popular hashtags (for example, #FollowFriday and #ff mean the same thing).

Sometimes a search won’t show you older tweets, because there are too many results. Consider doing one or more searches using the before: and since: date operators.

It is also a good idea to save common searches to save time typing in this search every day. Twitter allows you to save searches, but I find it most helpful to turn to a third party platform because you can save a search and it shows up as a constantly-updating column of tweets in your stream. This can be a valuable source of leads, ideas, and insight as conversations unfold minute-by-minute.

There are limitless possibilities to the ways you can combine these advanced search operators to help your business. Think about using advanced search techniques to discover:

People in your town who need your product or service

Positive sentiment about restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues in a new city you are visiting.

Relevant new contacts who are already expressing interest in your product.

Conversations expressing a negative sentiment about your competition.

How people are using your product in new ways

People using phrases that might indicate political alignment, an interest in a cause, or expertise that can help you

Influential online personalities mentioning your product

A case study

Here is just a small illustration of the potential. I just did a simple search for people in my hometown (pop. 600,000) talking about pizza. There is at least one mention of pizza every 20 minutes, on average, and the rate is higher during lunch and dinner time. Remember, the beauty of Twitter is that tweets are public so the search results are not just for the people you are following. These are results from every single person meeting your search criteria.

Here is a sample of local, pizza-related tweets in my city over a four-hour period. If you owned a pizza place in this town, what business benefits could you derive by discovering people publishing the following tweets:

Craving pizza but I’m broke. Where can I get pizza for some change in my pocket??

I want a really unhealthy burger, but there’s also Cici’s macaroni pizza.

What Pizza Looks Like Around the World: Turkish pizza looks yummy! (included a link to a photo essay on pizza)

I just dropped the pizza face front on the floor. I REALLY suck.

Not a good night for cooking. Thinking pizza

My parents are coming for a visit. What’s the best pizza parlor in town?

I just got so excited making a Lean Cuisine pizza. I really worked my butt off in the kitchen! LOL

Can you cook pizza in a toaster?

Dear delivery pizza people: You are all pansies for not delivering pizza today. The roads are not that bad!

The weather is bad but Papa John’s is still delivering. Thank you Papa Johns!!

Together, we could probably brainstorm some interesting business tactics from following this stream of tweets on an hourly basis. Some of the business opportunities might include:

Discovering the people in your delivery area who love pizza. This is your ideal Twitter community, right? Follow those people and put them on a List!

Tweeting back to create human, personal relationships with people in your city who talk about pizza

Providing helpful advice for people who have questions about buying pizza on a budget, cooking pizza in a toaster, or a recommendation for a family dinner (“Stop by and your beverages on are on us!”)

Competitor research – who has delivery cars on the move? Who is failing?

New product development – Macaroni pizza? Turkish pizza? What makes Lean Cuisine so good? Should we offer a diet or healthy version?

Create buzz – One person in your town ruined her pizza by dropping it on the floor. What do you think would happen if you tweeted her back publically to tell her you wanted to deliver a whole new pizza to her free of charge so she’s not hungry?

Content source – The link to pizza from around the world sounds interesting. If you have surrounded yourself with a local group of pizza fanatics, they might love to see a RT from you on this!

So you see even a small, family-owned pizza parlor could create transformational business benefits simply by paying attention to what people are saying on the Twitter stream. I hope you’ll experiment with these advanced search options and find ways to grow your business!

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Businessprogram, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

As always, a great article Mark. I use the Twitter advanced search form as this negates the need to remember the different syntax for advanced searches – https://twitter.com/search-advanced

I’ve started to use the search in Tweetdeck to monitor conversations that mention the product that the company I work for supplies. This way I can jump on any questions, including support queries that may appear, great for customer engagement and perception of our support function

Cheers

Barry

Michael Miller

Some great tips here. Thanks, Mark. Any recommendations on good third-party search tools? HootSuite?

http://www.marczewski.me.uk/ Andrzej Marczewski

Fantastic stuff as ever. Seems to be a typo around the sentiment searches. Missing for positive sentiments and for negative !

Great post, Twitter is such a wealth of information that businesses can put to use. Lots of untapped potential still for most companies. Seems like few people know how to mine this info and put it to work. You did a great job spelling it out for people.

Personally Twitter is delivering consistently for me and far out values Facebook, LinkedIn and the rest for marketing my business.

Yael Kochman

I started using Swayy and love it! They send me relevant content directly to my email that I can easily share on Twitter/FB/Linkedin

Great explanations of the various ways to search Twitter, Mark. I think it’s a highly underutilized function, especially the advanced portion. I love how you point out that local businesses should be doing this to really connect with people right in their time of need (this is something we actually do for our clients!).
There was an interesting post a couple weeks ago by Christopher S. Penn about using Twitter search for your own SEO keyword research, which I thought was an interesting way to use the search function, too. http://www.christopherspenn.com/2014/01/how-to-use-twitter-to-replace-seo-keyword-data/

http://www.3hatscommunications.com/blog/ Davina K. Brewer

Such a good resource, bookmarking this for future use. Gonna plug some of these in Tweetgrid, see what I can do. Thanks.

Judging from this article, the full IBM series must be great. I clicked the link in your post and kinda got lost. Is the series an ongoing one or has it completed? I couldn’t find a blog link on the IBM site your link went to. Thanks!

No, I do not think that is the case, at least in my experience. In this case, you are setting the parameters.

http://www.businessesgrow.com/ Mark W. Schaefer

It’s a cool program. IBM exerts no editorial control over my content. They simply want permission to suck it up into their site for display to their customers. I see what you mean about finding it hard to see the other content. Let me look into that.

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